Tyranniscus is a genus of small passerine birds in the tyrant flycatcher family Tyrannidae. The genus contains three species.
Taxonomy
The genus Tyranniscus was introduced in 1860 by the German ornithologists Jean Cabanis and Ferdinand Heine to accommodate a single species, Tyrannulus nigricapillus, the black-capped tyrannulet, that had first been formally described in 1845 by French ornithologist Frédéric de Lafresnaye.[1][2] The genus name is a diminutive of the Ancient Greek τυραννος/turannos meaning "tyrant".[3]
These species were formerly placed in the genus Phyllomyias. A large molecular phylogenetic study by Michael Harvey and collaborators published in 2020 found that the genus Phyllomyias was paraphyletic. As part of the reorganization to create monotypic genera, the genus Tyranniscus was resurrected to contain the above three species.[4][5]
^Harvey, M.G.; et al. (2020). "The evolution of a tropical biodiversity hotspot". Science. 370 (6522): 1343–1348. doi:10.1126/science.aaz6970. A high resolution version of the phylogenetic tree in Figure 1 is available from the first author's website here.
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